Examination of Witnesses (Questions 800-814)
Mr Cal Bailey, Mr Chris Sexton, Ms Lesley Seymour
and Mr Rainer Zimmann
6 MAY 2008
Q800 Earl of Selborne: I think you have
given us a lot of excellent ideas there on the construction of
the eco-town. Could you just tell us whether you think there are
opportunities at the design stage to change people's lifestyles
once they are living there? In other words, waste reduction in
the future from those sites. Are there ways of using that waste,
which inevitably in any household or indeed industry will appear,
in ways which would not be available outside the eco-town?
Mr Zimmann: I think it should be part of the
early design process to think about the operation and management
of the eco-town once it is all built and examples are, for instance,
looking at local treatment of green waste, looking at opportunities
for food waste to be used to create some energy locally that can
go towards renewable energy that can be used in the development;
and providing enough facilities for separation of waste within
dwellings and intermediate storage as well.
Q801 Earl of Selborne: That requires
infrastructure at an early stage in order to have the facility.
Mr Zimmann: Yes, and from my perspective and
from the example I can talk about that is already embedded in
the process to look into those opportunities.
Q802 Earl of Selborne: So presumably
any biodegradable waste will have a number of uses, therefore?
Mr Zimmann: Yes and certain business cases or
certain technologies and cost benefit analyses obviously will
need to be carried out for all these interventions to be more
sustainable; but it is possible.
Ms Seymour: Also, in contemplating the idea
of an eco-town you do not just want to just look at residential
developments; you have to think about mixed use developments and
therefore the opportunity of one type of waste generation, say
from the domestic sector, can then be reused by the industrial
sector, and if they are located within a proximity of a town then
that is more viable for use, is it not? If it is all very much
segregated you cannot then repay one user—waste for one
is a fuel for another, one would suggest. So I think we need to
think about how we create multidisciplinary mixed use developments
rather than zoned residential versus other types of land usage.
Mr Sexton: Which would also play into looking
at the whole travel issue where an enormous amount of fuels are
consumed moving people from A to B, from where they live to work,
and that sort of thing, and I think if you had the opportunity
to design something from scratch there would be opportunities
to look at how you could reduce fuel use amongst the people who
lived there.
Q803 Lord Methuen: New technologies are
now being promoted in the construction industry to make buildings
more energy-efficient. Does the use of these novel processes have
a knock-on effect on the industry's ability to reduce waste?
Mr Sexton: I think, my Lord, it does in one
important respect, and that is that energy-efficient buildings
require a very high level of good quality design and construction,
which again plays back into getting that design fixed at an early
stage in the project. All those good behaviours and practices
for energy-efficient buildings, it would be easy to attend to
the waste requirements at the same time, and I think that is a
significant step forward. If you get the energy-efficiency right
there is no reason why you should not get the waste management
right at the same time. But in terms of the direct cause and effect
between energy-efficiency and waste I am not sure.
Q804 Lord Methuen: Do more complex buildings
with multiple parts make it harder for construction companies
to recycle material?
Ms Seymour: In my experience in civil engineering,
where we talked before about the grey area of construction waste
being supported by law, effectively, anything new coming into
that process can seem to be challenging. If people are not familiar
with where it sits within the waste hierarchy or the waste chain
of custody then any innovative product can become a problem, but
a lot of that is down to good communication with the various different
regulators and people who might feel uncomfortable about the process
and with incorporating that waste maybe into a recycled product.
Mr Zimmann: I think when it comes to complex
components and complex buildings the biggest issue there is to
get it into the design specifiation and to ensure that the design
is not changed last minute because research has shown that that
can result in significant wastage, if you have to redesign. So
the less complex the building the easier it is to get it right
first time really.
Q805 Chairman: Do you think that with
these kinds of complex constructions that sufficient attention
is given to some of the lower tiered contractors who are not necessarily
central at the initial stage, but when they do become part of
the process it is often too late?
Mr Zimmann: I think there should be more integration
of the different trades and different design aids to ensure that
there are openings already designed in and not that any contractor
comes and says, "I have to create all these openings or generate
waste at the same time." What I would like to see is more
offsite manufacturing where a lot of this can actually be taken
out of the equation and it becomes more of a production process
as we know from the old mobile industry, which is much more efficient
and where you can actually control the by-products much better
than on the site.
Ms Seymour: In my experience the major contractors
quite often take responsibility for the subcontractor in their
management of waste—they cannot stand back from that; it
is part of their requirements. So I know that there is quite a
lot of activity going on in the construction industry to support
those small to medium sized enterprises in developing better practice
around waste. It is a long tale.
Mr Sexton: We are certainly involved in that
with anybody who works with us in our supply chain.
Mr Bailey: Speaking as someone who sometimes
is involved late the cost of that and the inefficiency and the
waste that results is just huge and the need for early involvement
and the need for integration with the other members of the team
who are both designing and building the project is enormous if
waste is to be minimised. That is precisely because drawings sometimes
are not viewed holistically; that we need to pull things out and
put things in again and that is, by definition, waste.
Chairman: Could we move on to the last
section of our questions, relating to Government initiatives.
We are always loathe to say we are from the Government and we
are here to help you, but by the same token I think there are
some areas that probably you would want to raise with us.
Q806 Lord Bhattacharyya: To what extent
do building regulations specify measures to encourage sustainability
and do they contain sufficient provisions to encourage waste reduction
during the construction, refurbishment and demolition of buildings?
Mr Zimmann: I think they do provide suitable
guidance for energy conservation and other related issues but
not for construction waste. The only area that I can think of
where it is related is there is some guidance on how to manage
contaminated soils, which is quite an important area because there
are a lot of soils being moved around on sites, and to retain
them on site by having treated them and then they become suitable
for use is obviously a good thing. So there is some information
on that. But when it comes to demolition, construction practice,
refurbishment, I do not think there is any sort of great guidance
there.
Q807 Lord Bhattacharyya: As a matter
of interest, being in manufacturing, what proportion of buildings
get manufactured offsite?
Mr Bailey: For the very best sites it is about
20% currently. We need to understand what we mean by "manufactured".
In a sense everything is manufactured offsite in the sense that
a building does not start where it finishes—it is all brought
in and it has been manufactured or dug somewhere. But if we talk
about modern methods of construction the very best sites would
be 20% and the worst would be nil or close to nil. In terms of
what is meant by offsite construction that is, in our terms, advanced
panels which are fully wired before they arrive on site, cables
which need no terminations, taking huge numbers of hours offsite—that
is what we mean by offsite manufacture. Buildings that are preassembled,
completed, even insulated and very substantially finished in the
factory before they are delivered; toilet parts and those kinds
of things.
Q808 Lord Bhattacharyya: Are there central
factories where you do that?
Mr Sexton: Yes, we have our own factory and
we buy from others as well.
Q809 Lord Bhattacharyya: I have recently
spoken to Mr O'Rourke, your owner, who said that Laing O'Rourke
was going to set up factories all over the country just for that
purpose.
Mr Sexton: That is happening, my Lord. We have
one factory already in Wolverhampton which produces mechanical
and electrical, both components and ready made pods in the way
that Mr Bailey was just describing, and we are about to start
building a pre-cast concrete factory at the old Steetley Colliery
on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, which will come on stream
during the course of next year. So that is very much the way in
which we are heading as well. Whilst I have the floor, in terms
of building regulations I agree with my colleague that building
regulations themselves are not particularly strong on waste reduction.
I think there is a question whether, given all the planning regulations,
strengthening building regulations is the right tool to be strengthening—maybe
one could just look at the planning regulations and further strengthen
those. It is a matter of choosing the right tool.
Ms Seymour: In addition to building regulations
there are also performance specifications around the Highways
Agency's specification for materials. The water industry has its
own guidance and regulation, which I guess would complement the
building regulations in terms of installing resource efficiency
as core, and I think that there is still some work to be done
there to ensure consistency of regulation from what one would
perceive to be Government if the Highways Agency fell under that
banner. So if the Highways Agency regulation ties up with the
waste management licensing and ties up with resource efficiency
I think that will help significantly to reduce waste.
Q810 Lord Methuen: How should waste reduction
policies and strategies be tailored for construction businesses
of varying sizes? Obviously it is quite a different matter if
you have a large firm like Laing O'Rourke as opposed to a small
one-man builder.
Mr Bailey: We are a smaller firm. We are large
in our sector but I will try and speak on behalf of smaller firms.
The issue I have been made most aware of by them is the issue
of recycling goods that they may remove from premises when there
is refurbishment work going on—electrical goods, heating
goods, for example—and I understand that there is considerable
difficulty in knowing how to recycle those goods. If they take
them to a local authority skip they will be told to go away because
they are in a white van and they only take domestic household
waste, and yet the manufacturers will not take them back either.
So there is some difficulty there and we need simple rules so
that they know where to take these goods—manufacturers either
do take them or they do not, local authorities either do take
them or they do not; and if the answer is no, they do not, then
we know there will be a problem. Simple measures like that need
to be clarified, and they are not clear at the moment.
Ms Seymour: Taking your point about small contractors,
a lot of them, we found, were really struggling with the guidance
and the volumes of regulation that they need to be up to speed
with, and in order to feel confident that they are making a good
decision about construction waste. And to move towards a more
resource efficient approach you have to be really confident that
you are interpreting the regulations correctly, and we found that
they had problems with that. With the Health & Safety Executive
for health and safety, they felt that was very clear where they
went for guidance and support. Whereas for construction waste
one would assume that maybe the Environment Agency is the first
port of call but probably does not address all of their concerns,
and maybe we need a clearer line on all environmental issues for
people to get information from.
Q811 Lord Haskel: You have told us that
the secret of sustainability in waste is really in good design
and integration. Is there Government advice which is available
to construction companies for this? Is the advice satisfactory
and does it encourage people to share the vision?
Mr Sexton: From our perspective there is plenty
of advice available and I think we have heard about most of it
this morning—the Environment Agency, WRAP, Envirowise, the
NISP, BREW and so on and so forth. What we are looking for is
clarity and consistency in that advice and as a big player in
the construction industry we are able to cope with information
coming at us from many different directions with a team of people
who are experts in it. So we are fine; there is plenty of advice
which we can synthesise, but I do wonder whether much smaller
firms are capable of doing it in the way that we can because we
are able to devote the resources to it.
Ms Seymour: Equally a number of those funded
schemes, certainly the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste
one is targeted on waste saving, which you would not suggest is
a bad idea. But from what we have discussed this morning you will
see that it is the process that is actually important—to
instil the correct process into a business such that it becomes
part of their culture to be resource efficient, rather than purely
looking from where those funded bodies can identify quick wins
in terms of large waste savings. I think sometimes the targeting
of that support information, maybe helping to look at process
more than the delivered out-turn, would be useful. Certainly for
small to medium sized enterprises, simplifying guidance and giving
them some clear procedures that are easy to follow if there are
only four of you in the company would be important.
Mr Zimmann: We might be in a situation where
over the last couple of years a lot of investment has been channelled
down into actually producing the evidence base and producing exemplars
and case studies for good practice, and at the same time there
are too many Government bodies that have started providing the
industry with advice. As for myself, particularly smaller companies
probably feel that it is difficult to catch up with all of this.
So maybe it is time to ensure that there is a bit more focus put
on those, and that where there is some crossover that there is
good coordination so that there is no duplication of work there.
Ms Seymour: If I can just follow up on that?
In our research we found that people were very comfortable going
to their professions and the trade bodies to get that information,
but where it came from Government agencies they obviously had
to reposition themselves into the construction sector, which,
as we know, is generally quite traditional. So even finding that
information, if it is branded under the WRAP or Envirowise or
whatever logo, has to provide legitimacy to that for the construction
company to engage with it. We found that where it went through,
say, the Civil Engineering and Contractors Association, they were
very receptive to that information. So I think the channel to
market is important for advice and guidance.
Q812 Chairman: Do you think more could
be done and perhaps having better links on the Internet between
various sites so that if people are going so far down one food
chain, as it were, then an indication can be given that the next
subset is not here but somewhere else. It is done in an awful
lot of areas but from what you have been saying to us this morning
there is a plethora of different information points and maybe
what is required is someone to—not necessarily pull all
the threads together but to try and link them up.
Mr Bailey: I would very strongly endorse that
on behalf of smaller businesses. There are so many sources of
advice—and is it advice or is it requirements? Generic advice
is not hard to find at all. Knowing what you actually have to
do and knowing you have it all is the problem for smaller businesses—indeed,
it is a problem for all of us, but as my colleague says large
businesses should be able to handle that. But for smaller businesses
it is mightily confusing, and the idea of having a single source
for that could be very attractive, and for that advice to be simple,
easily applied, knowing exactly what you have to do and enforced
so that you know that you have to do it and there is no doubt
that is a need for every business.
Ms Seymour: That regulation line is important
in that single source of guidance where who is the custodian,
who is mandating that this actually happens—it is important
to make those links as well as purely to advice and guidance.
Q813 Earl of Selborne: I was interested
to read in Laing O'Rourke's written submission that you pointed
out that procurement procedures offer an opportunity to contribute
to waste minimisation and resource efficiency. And it is clear
from your experience of Terminal 5 that where you have a customer,
a client in the right frame of mind you have opportunities for
recycling and for waste minimisation. In the context of Government
initiatives can you tell us to what extent Government as a procurer
is equally effective; or what is their record like?
Mr Sexton: We are anticipating a standard of
BREEAM excellent, which I think is 70% in all public procurement
projects going forward, and that is a pretty high bar and something
to which we will have to conform. We are anticipating it coming
in—I do not think it has quite been announced yet—and
that will be a significant encouragement in public procurement.
There are other things in Government from the NAO Report last
year, GLA requirements and so on and so forth. So the ultimate
answer is yes, the Government is encouraging us through public
procurement to do better, and I think that BREEAM excellent for
public projects is probably the biggest thing that we are expecting
shortly, and in fact we are doing that with the Manchester Schools
Programme already.
Ms Seymour: The Office of Government Commerce
about 18 months ago came out with their common minimum standards
for the construction sector, which specified BREEAM and waste
targets and the civil engineering environmental quality assessment
rating that you heard about before, and that is effectively being
implemented by Government agencies. So there are some increasing
standards—they call them minimum standards—above building
regulations, and industry standards that the public sector has
to procure to. From the NAO Report it suggests that that is challenging
and part of the challenge is the cultural transition in movement
towards those more collaborative ways of working and attaining
those standards. So I think Government is doing quite a lot.
Q814 Earl of Selborne: So what differentiates
between rubbing along with these minimum standards to which you
are referring and examples of best practice in public procurement?
Ms Seymour: I think the common minimum standards
pull those best practices together and sets that as a common minimum
standard across all public procurement, such that you all have
a level playing field effectively for procuring Government standards,
so that is where it sets it forward. So really it is trying to
move on beyond minimum standards, which is the other approach,
into good or best practice type standards there, that the public
sector is proactively supporting, of which BREEAM is one.
Chairman: Thank you very much. That is very helpful.
As we always say at the end, if there is anything else you would
like to provide us with information on, if you think, "I
wish I had thought of that," please feel free to do so because
we will also contact you as well if we feel we need to. Thank
you, that has been very helpful; you are a good spread of the
industry and I think that the two sessions have not really overlapped
in a very difficult way but in a very—if I dare use the
word—constructive way!
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